Nov 4, 2010

PURITY OF LIFE

Man is a queer admixture of the animal, the human and the divine. The lower Man includes the animal and the lower human. The higher Man envelopes the higher human and the divine. The divine encompasses satan and god( Satan and God are the sum total of all individual satans and gods.)

A simpler way of looking at Man is to see Man as body, mind and soul.

From Freud’s angle of vision Man is id, ego and super ego.

Then, there are the dichotomies like the physical and the ethereal, the matter and the mind, the impure and the pure, the mortal and the immortal, the tangible and the intangible , etc .

God is one of the two dichotomies – the Ethereal, the Pure, the Immortal, the Intangible, the non-physical … the Permanent, etc.

Ghalib has said:

Lataafat be kasaafat jalwa paida kar naheen saktee

Chaman zangaar hai aaeena-e-baad-e-bahaari ka

What he means is: the Pure cannot manifest itself without what is Impure. The pure glass needs the impurity of a layer of mercury for it to be able to reflect the seer’s image. That is why you are able to perceive the spring breeze by looking into its mirror in which the spring blossms of the garden serve as the layer of mercury in the mirror.

I was initiated by my Peer-o-murshid in 1972. He used to say: murshid Allah (hai),Allah murshid naheen(hai).I got rattled as I was not able to swallow the statement: Guru is God…God is not Guru. But I never asked him to explain. Instead, I prayed for a purer mind so that I could understand what he said. I took 10 years to understand that Ghalib’s couplet and his statement mean the same. God as such will never come to show the path. He comes in the garb of a Guru. The Pure has to put on the Impure. The Nirakaar(beyond form) has to attain aakaar(form) for the benefit of our sense receptacles.

The Niraakaar is Pure. The Saakaar is Impure. Only He, the Pure, the Niraakaar ( Or,pick any of the non-physical in the dichotomies stated above) is Permanent. The Creator is Permanent, the created is not.

We, the created, have a life to live before death unifies us with the non-physical. We attain purity in death – the death of the physical. Then, what is purity of life?

We have been told at school Cleanliness is next to Godliness. I believe, the more cleanly we get, the nearer we are to God. In other words getting cleanlier is getting purer.

How can we get cleanlier? Can we get cleanlier every day? I think, we can. The journey starts in the mind. In the mind one says: I have to get cleanlier every day. The very idea is a Godsend. Sheer Grace of God it is. The mind tells you to take care of the body because you learnt at school: sound mind in a sound body. You begin to do everything to keep your body fit and fine so that you can keep it cleanlier everyday on your own. Soon, you begin to perceive, this body, in fact, is the temple or the church or the mosque in which your God resides. You are the caretaker of His Residence.

To keep the residence clean not only from outside but inside also, you do everything that is necessary. In order for your body to look beautiful you do all possible physical exercises. Your body looks beautiful and the world outside begins to like it. But does it look beautiful inside? Only you can see! That’s where honesty, the inside cleanser joins in and you begin all the necessary mental and religious exercises. Exercises need nutrition – the right kind of diet that suits your system, not just your palate.

You can choose from meat or vegetables or both to go with the cereals or the staple food you prefer.

Meat comes from the animal world. What do the animals do to get their food? They move around in search of food. Their movement is on the horizontal plane. Vegetables and fruits come from plants and trees. Their movement is in the vertical plane. They get their food from the earth beneath and the environment above.

Look at the meat eaters. They have, like animals, moved all over the world. They are the imperialists. Look at the vegetable eaters. They haven’t crossed seas. They are the spiritualists. The conclusion is: for worldly progress, eat meat; for spiritual progress, vegetables. What about Christian and Muslim saints? A careful study reveals they have reduced to the minimum ,or even stopped, eating meat in their advanced stages of spiritual pursuit.

Cleanlier food generates cleanlier thoughts. You begin to eat less and sleep less, too, and yet maintain a sound body and a sound mind.

As you get cleanlier, the impurities decrease and the purities increase. The animal in you has left you, the lower human has left you and you are left with the higher human and the divine in you. In Freud’s terms, you are left with a few traces of ego and all of super ego. If you are now blessed by the Grace of God and those few traces of ego, too, recede into nothingness, you are Super Ego. That, I believe, is the ultimate in the purity of life.